The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

376 The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
necessary part of the integral Truth and the integral Knowledge.
For if the Self is always one in all, yet we see that for the purposes
at least of the cyclic manifestation it expresses itself in
perpetual soul-forms which preside over the movements of our
personality through the worlds and the aeons. This persistent
soul-existence is the real Individuality which stands behind the
constant mutations of the thing we call our personality. It is not
a limited ego but a thing in itself infinite; it is in truth the Infinite
itself consenting from one plane of its being to reflect itself in
a perpetual soul-experience. This is the truth which underlies
the Sankhya theory of many Purushas, many essential, infinite,
free and impersonal souls reflecting the movements of a single
cosmic energy. It stands also, in a different way, behind the
very different philosophy of qualified Monism which arose as a
protest against the metaphysical excesses of Buddhistic Nihilism
and illusionist Adwaita. The old semi-Buddhistic, semi-Sankhya
theory which saw only the Quiescent and nothing else in the
world except a constant combination of the five elements and the
three modes of inconscient Energy lighting up their false activity
by the consciousness of the Quiescent in which it is reflected, is
not the whole truth of the Brahman. We are not a mere mass of
changing mind-stuff, life-stuff, body-stuff taking different forms
of mind and life and body from birth to birth, so that at no time
is there any real self or conscious reason of existence behind
all the flux or none except that Quiescent who cares for none
of these things. There is a real and stable power of our being
behind the constant mutation of our mental, vital and physical
personality, and this we have to know and preserve in order that
the Infinite may manifest Himself through it according to His
will in whatever range and for whatever purpose of His eternal
cosmic activity.
And if we regard existence from the standpoint of the possible
eternal and infinite relations of this One from whom all
things proceed, these Many of whom the One is the essence and
the origin and this Energy, Power, or Nature through which the
relations of the One and the Many are maintained, we shall
see a certain justification even for the dualist philosophies and